Make it stop! I’m really not crazy, but when I dilligently follow up on leads as they arise, I often find crazy things. This crazy thing popped up when I was searching for info on when Naomi Gibson’s book would be coming out.
Her book was originally scheduled to come out in March, but they have pushed it back to November and I wanted to read it because her blurb matched that of my first novel on a point for point basis. My interest heightened when I looked at her Twitter feed and everything about her looked somehow off.
- she has no prior writing footprint with which to validate the speed or quality of her work
- her initial profile described her as a floristry student (flower arranger)
- this later changed to art history major in college
- she finished a breakout novel in less than six months
- she started to write it right after my book was published
- she got an agent for it before her book was even finished.
None of this sounded like anything that would just happen without some powerful people pulling the strings. She looked like a sock puppet for a brand someone was launching, not an actual person or writer.
When I googled Naomi Gibson’s name, I saw that she had written a blurb praising a book named Reset by another debut author named Sarina Dahlan, a woman who moved to the US from Thailand when she was 12, majored in art and psychology and had 3 kids. I’m thinking: Is this a fake person too? Birds of a feather flock together.
Then I started reading the first few chapters of Dahlan’s book and I got a familiar sinking feeling. It is the feeling that hits me when I worry that I might be looking at another rip-off or example of recycled literary material. The whole book hasn’t been released yet, so the list of points of plot overlap that I made below is only based on the first few chapters, but it is unusually long.
- There is a young woman protagonist
- she is with a man she doesn’t remember being married to from another life
- she lives in a future world and has an AI assistant
- she lives in an apartment with a virtual window that can simulate any location
- memories are erased and given to people by some sort of system
- she is curious about love but doesn’t seem to think it is possible in this world
- there is a white haired woman who has a bird as a pet
- the entire memory of a population can be created from scratch
- she is in a modern city where she is shot high in the sky and low beneath the earth
- the utopian main city was built after a great cataclysm that wiped out everything else
- she has an important meeting with a professor at her workplace
- her workplace contains the city’s knowledge and it has a Director
- the professor has a book that she is encouraged to read
- her mentors often refer to her as ‘my dear’
- she talks about dreams with her mentor
- the professor’s knowledge is simplistic and emblematic of no progress
- when people lose their memories, they lose contact to their old lives
- the old lives can sometimes re-emerge after a re-programming
- she talks to an academic authority figure on a train
- a man like Brave New World’s John the Savage makes an appearance
- people in the city all have tracking devices
- The ‘Interpreter Center’ sounds like my ‘Snowflake Method Center”
- she only seems to vaguely know what caused the Cataclysm
- she describes the modern cities as planned and created after the Cataclysm
- the utopian, modern cities are connected by high speed trains
- The blank slate philosophy seems inspired by Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – a book I wrote about in an old blog post.
- People can leave the cities but they wouldn’t want to because the outside world is dangerous
- There is a scene where instead of being taught about her world, she is teaching others. (I’ve noticed that a lot of rip offs take a concept and invert it.)
- She recounts having her mind erased.
- Her name is Aris, my protagonist was named Alix – it sounds similar
- She has a pale, young male friend who likes her but she isn’t in love with him.
- The professor doesn’t really like young women at all.
- She has a male co-worker who is interested in her. He outranks her.
- She doesn’t think it is possible to fall in love in this city
These points are a bit re-arranged compared to how they appear in my book, but this is the list from only the first few chapters of Dahalan’s book. As the stories go on, the list invariably gets longer. I know that a lot of the points are generic and that it is like a snapshot of what many YA people are thinking about the future, yet this is an above average level of overlap for just the first few chapters.
I need to analyze some control variables to prove this, but I’m already suspicious about how this book was produced. It comes out at the end of the month.
If I were to use this situation for fictional inspiration, I would suggest that both me and Sarina have had our minds erased after leaving our academic positions and that while we were recovering, we were both told the same story. Even though we don’t remember being told the story, it has seeped out through our dreams and literary expressions!
I don’t know if I’d rather believe such a horrifying idea or believe that there are a bunch of dirty thieves using a software package that mines people’s books for content. Both options are awful.
Perhaps a clue to what is going on can be found in an old Tweet from Naomi Gibson.
She tweeted that directly prior to writing Every Line of You, she had beta read 31 unpublished YA (young adult) books.
When I read that, I wondered if ‘Naomi Gibson’ was really a type of AI writing tool that spliced together 31 YA, sci-fi books – one of which was mine. I’m speculating, of course, but taking the bones from one novel, re-arranging them a bit, and pasting the flesh from 30 other novels onto them is a viable way to create a book these days. Engineered writing systems have come a long ways with the advent of GPT3 like tools. You just identify similar character and place types in the books, identify where they appear in the plot and let the best descriptions bubble to the surface.
The writing in Reset is lyrical and lovely with lots of wonderful texture and scenery, but I would expect that if a book is constructed by pulling the best bits out of 30 other books and using 1 book to structure the concoction!
There were two odd scenes near the beginning of Reset that to me seemed like a veiled admission of how books are rehashed with modern tools.
The first involved an older woman feeding a bunch of hungry birds. She said:
“They like my seeds.”
and in context, this comment seemed awkward and very out of place. It reminded me of a seed in a random number generator and of people liking the seed material for a new book.
The other scene that jumped out at me did so because it showed an unusual amount of humility for an author:
“Professor Jacobs? The one who wrote Manual of the Four Cities?”
“You know me?”
“Yes! Of course. I’ve been reading your book.”
“Everyone keeps telling me it’s my book.”
“It’s the best interpretation of the Planner’s ideology I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s just rewriting his words, my dear. I don’t really think of it as mine,” he said.
….
It reminded me of a woman who recently Tweeted: “I just won a Hugo award but feel like an impostor”
She was asking for sympathy after having won the award.
That’s rather strange unless she won the award after having used a software package to construct her book.
Are software packages writing better books than people these days?
Why are floristry students suddenly becoming novelists and getting agents after less than 6 months of work?
Has writing a novel become as easy as arranging flowers that 31 other people grew in their gardens?
If it is true that my novel has been rewritten 10 times within 3 years, I think authors everywhere should realize that we all have a big problem on our hands.
Kirsten Hacker 
7 thoughts on “Not another one!”